Latest posts
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Women in Love: D.H. Lawrence’s Most Ambitious Novel
The Erato Press edition Two sisters, two very different men, and a novel Lawrence considered his most important work — more ambitious than the more famous Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and considerably stranger. Gudrun and Ursula Brangwen pursue love with Gerald and Rupert as a philosophical proposition as much as a romance, testing whether real intimacy…
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Howards End: Forster and the Question of Who Inherits England
The Erato Press edition ‘Only connect’ is the epigraph and the argument of Howards End: Forster’s attempt to bridge England’s widening class divide through the Schlegel sisters — cultured, progressive, and comfortably wealthy — and the Wilcoxes, a family of unreflective, effective businessmen who actually run the country’s institutions while barely thinking about them. The…
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The Vampyre: Polidori, Byron, and the Night That Invented Two Monsters
The Erato Press edition The same rain-soaked night at Villa Diodati in 1816 that produced Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein also produced this: John Polidori, Byron’s personal physician, turning a fragment Byron abandoned into The Vampyre, the story that essentially invented the modern vampire as a seductive aristocrat rather than a mindless folkloric corpse. Polidori’s Lord Ruthven…
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Works and Days: Hesiod’s Guide to Justice and Hard Work
The Erato Press edition Where Theogony gave the Greeks their gods, Works and Days gives them a farmer’s almanac fused with a moral argument — Hesiod, writing directly to a brother who had cheated him out of part of their inheritance through bribed judges, moves from a furious case for justice straight into practical instructions…
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Carmilla: The Vampire Novella That Predates Dracula
The Erato Press edition Twenty-six years before Dracula, Sheridan Le Fanu published a vampire novella about a beautiful, weak, entrancing young woman named Carmilla who insinuates herself into a lonely girl’s household and, over months, into an intimacy the narrator can’t quite name but clearly experiences as more than friendship. Stoker read it closely; Dracula’s…
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Rikki-Tikki-Tavi and the Best of the Jungle Books
The Erato Press edition Mowgli gets both books named after him, but the single most self-contained, perfectly built story Kipling ever wrote about the wild is the one about a mongoose. Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, adopted by an English family in India after nearly drowning, spends the story defending their garden against Nag and Nagaina, a pair of…
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Sonya Marmeladova: Dostoevsky’s Redemptive Heroine
The Erato Press edition Sonya is forced into prostitution to feed her family, and Dostoevsky places her, deliberately, as the moral center of a novel about a murder she had nothing to do with. When Raskolnikov finally confesses his crime, it’s to her, alone, in a scene Dostoevsky builds as something close to a religious…
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Twelfth Night: Shakespeare’s Gender-Bending Comedy
The Erato Press edition Viola, shipwrecked and believing her twin brother drowned, disguises herself as a young man to find work and ends up delivering love letters, on behalf of the duke she secretly loves, to a countess who promptly falls for the messenger instead of the sender. Shakespeare builds an entire comedy out of…
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Telemachus: The Coming-of-Age Story Inside the Odyssey
The Erato Press edition The Odyssey doesn’t open with Odysseus. It opens with his son, a young man who has grown up entirely in his absence, watching a houseful of suitors devour his inheritance while he’s too inexperienced and unsupported to stop them. The first four books belong almost entirely to Telemachus, and they are,…
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As You Like It: Rosalind and the Forest of Arden
The Erato Press edition Rosalind, banished from court, disguises herself as a young man named Ganymede and flees into the Forest of Arden — and then, in one of Shakespeare’s most audacious comic conceits, ends up coaching her own unwitting suitor Orlando on how to woo ‘Rosalind,’ while disguised as a boy pretending to be…